Attack the Block (review)
Take that, Spielberg, with your suburban alien invasions and your gentle parables about acceptance and stuff. Why don’t the aliens ever land in the ’hood, where no one will take their shit sitting down?
black comedy
Bad Teacher (review)
A refreshing breath of just-so-wrongness in today’s movie milieu.
Insidious (review)
I can’t help but recall Eddie Murphy’s standup bit in which he suggested — this is decades ago now — that when a scary voice in your haunted house tells you to “Gettttt outtttt!” the best thing to do is leave…
Scream 4 (review)
You wanna know who the killer is? I’ll tell you who the killer is. In fact, there’s two killers: that’s the twist. Director Wes Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson worked in tandem here to murder the horror comedy… or at least their own franchise. Not that it wasn’t dead already.
Rubber (review)
A tire develops sentience. And independent mobility. Be afraid. Because it can also kill you with its mind. Yes, it has a mind. And it enjoys killing you with its mind. Be also amused, in a deeply weird, weirdly deep sort of way…
Killing Bono (review)
In Dublin in the late 1970s, a bunch of guys who fancied being rock stars even though they couldn’t play a lick of music formed two bands that developed a friendly rivalry. One of those bands went on to become U2. This is the story of the other band.
Paul (review)
What if you and your most superbly geeky bestest friend ever met an alien? I mean a real life honest-to-Carl Sagan extry terrestrial. What if? You would plotz. You would. Like Nick Frost’s Clive does here, you would giggle like a loon and then faint, out cold from the sheer splendidness of this happenstance. I know I would.
Rango (review)
How can it be that a kiddie movie is wiser and funnier and more relevant than the Coens Brothers’ True Grit? This is, in fact, what a Coens’ animated flick might look like and sound like, if they got an assist from Terry Giliam: this is a deeply weird and deeply demented movie, and thrillingly so.
Drive Angry 3D (review)
I’d like to call Drive Angry Ghost Rider 2: Ghost Driver, except that a sequel to Cage’s previous awful example of cinematic demonic road rage is, in fact, already in production, for our sins. I might better call it Con Air Goes to Hell, because of the beautiful — and by beautiful, I mean, of course, vile and reprehensible — way it picks up the gauntlet thrown down by that violently misogynist film and slaps that gauntlet right at the viewer. In 3D!
I Love You Phillip Morris (review)
Bad Santa writers Glenn Ficarra and John Requa graduate to writer-directors here, and give us a warmly human and hugely funny story that’s almost a sendup of both prison melodramas and hetero romantic comedies… yet is also a truly amorous and very satisfying tale about the extremes to which a man will go for love.
